


Lyctor? I Hardly Knew Her

by gloss



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Femslash Festivus, Gen, Grief, Harrow Gets Some, Make the Yuletide Gay, Summoning, hot ladies of the afterlife, minor Harrow/OFC, post-book I, the river between life and death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21840811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: It might be an all-powerful nerd-vana, but lyctorhood is (also) lonely and boring. Harrow renews the Ninth, searches for traces of Gideon, and tries to avoid Ianthe's harassment. The Emperor isn't much help in any of these endeavors.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 11
Kudos: 87
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Lyctor? I Hardly Knew Her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The Blue Escapist (TheBlueEscapist)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBlueEscapist/gifts).



Harrow should have known that becoming a relatively immortal being would require a radical change in her sense of time. The emperor and his hands work on a very different scale than any human, or recently human, could conceive.

In other words, nothing happened, all the time, very slowly. They were left to their own devices for the most part; this would have been _delightful_ for Harrow had she not been cooped up on the _Mithraeum_ with a lunatic asshole like Ianthe Tridentarius. Wherever Harrow went, whether study carrel or simulation lab, Ianthe was sure to cross her path and spit her bile.

This morning, for instance, Harrow was merely heading back to her cabin from the cafetorium when Ianthe peeled herself out of the shadows and blocked her way.

"Tragic, really, when you think about it. The little nun, inadequate in necromancy as she is in emotion."

"You think about me?" Harrowhark asked. "Perhaps I should be flattered."

Ianthe lifted her armless shoulder. "No."

"Well, then." Harrow made to move around Ianthe, but the larger woman slipped with her, still blocking her way. "Excuse me."

"Thinks she knows so much about death, and yet..." Ianthe trailed off, clearly in a manner she considered _meaningful_ , even intimidating, but Harrow jumped back and slid around her. 

"I know more than enough about death," Harrow said as she proceeded down the passage. Careful not to hurry, despite how much she wanted to, she added, "I'm learning more all the time. Unlike some."

"Sad little cinder," Ianthe crooned. She was back in front of Harrow again; her delight in teleporting small distances was usually merely annoying, but just now it was becoming enraging. "You don't know _anything_."

Harrow drew herself up as she rubbed thumb against forefinger. A chip of bone in her palm sprang forward and snapped open like a jack knife into a skeleton taller than either her or Ianthe. It assumed a defensive stance in front of her, arms crossed, mandibular symphysis tilted up.

"Parlor trickery," Ianthe muttered, but she stepped back and turned for the next passage. "Resorting to shams and illusions like some itinerant fake adept. Imagine claiming necromantic authority yet knowing nothing of grief."

"You're an expert?" Harrow called, hating that she'd fallen for such easy bait. " _You_."

"No," Ianthe replied. "But then, I don't need to be."

The Third did love her witless and vague aphorisms. Harrow had long considered that sort of speechifying a poor cover for insecurity. She still did; Ianthe's bravado waxed ever-louder, the more time passed and the less that the Emperor paid them much notice.

As usual, Ianthe spoke utter nonsense. A necromancer who did not grasp grief was standard. What was there to grieve when one had the power to reach across the river and take back what and who were needed? What use was mourning when nothing was truly over, no one ever fully gone?

Grief belonged to the ordinary, those who lost and stayed lost, those caught up in the unidirectional prison of mortality. Harrow had always been beyond grief; her conception ensured that. Achieving lyctorhood merely codified this fact.

That, at least, was what she told herself by way of consolation.

*

The ship was in the depths of a wormhole; everyone's sense of gravity and time was fluctuating to nauseous degrees. Yet here was Tridentarius, lying in wait and tossing tumor-bombs at Harrow's feet to make her dance.

"What is your deep psychological _damage_ , Third?" Harrow jumped back from the restroom's autodoor and kicked away the squishy tumors.

"Nothing you'd understand."

"If you weren't a psychopath, I'd suggest maybe you're going mad with guilt."

Ianthe laughed. "No."

"No," Harrow agreed. "On account of the psychopathy."

"Among other issues, sure," Ianthe said. "I don't feel guilt, Nine. I never did before and I certainly don't now." She tilted her head, looking for all the world like a skeleton construct instructed to "be coquettish". "Why? Do _you_?"

"Feel guilty?"

"Yes."

As if she would admit anything to Ianthe. Harrow shifted her balance and tossed a rattling stole, thousands of distal phalanges woven with black silk, over her shoulder. "I'm not guilty of anything, so, no. It's not as if I murdered a bosom companion, after all."

Ianthe shoved past her. "You may not be guilty, but you're certainly grief-stricken. Such an irony, isn't it? The Reverend Daughter of the Tomb itself, yet you have less than no clue how to mourn."

"I don't need to mourn," Harrow said. "So that's fine."

*

"Don't pay too much attention to Ianthe," the Emperor said. He was busy brushing crumbs off the front of his shabby argyle vest, so he startled when Harrow snorted loudly in response.

She had, so far, submitted five requests for an imperial audience. Ianthe's harassment was tolerable, but if she didn't _have_ to tolerate the snipe, she'd rather do that. After what felt like months of silence, a note hastily scrawled on real paper appeared in her cabin. He invited her to tea, welcoming her as if they'd only seen each other last week. For him, it probably felt like that short a period.

"Let me guess," she said when he frowned and tipped his head inquisitively. "She's just jealous? Whatever she says about me reflects more on her than on me? Maybe even...she's just trying to get my attention?"

He blinked for a while. Finally, he said, "Well. Yes. Pretty much."

He blinked some more when she laughed at him.

"Is that not the case?" he asked when her giggles receded.

"No, far from it."

"But she constantly provokes you." He let the sentence dangle, halfway to a question.

Harrow nodded. "She does. But it's not attention she seeks. Not really."

He frowned as he fidgeted with his tea spoon. "I thought that..."

"My Lord, taproot of the withered world-tree, first among adepts, you may have transgressed farther and deeper than any other necromancer, and of course your undying power is the ligament binding and animating the skeleton construct we call society, but when it comes to young women...frankly, you kind of suck."

He nodded, rubbed his stubbly chin, and plucked a fairly large crumb off his sweater vest to taste. "No doubt."

Harrow had both arms wrapped around herself. She sat sideways in one of the emperor's squashy club chairs, her knees drawn up, toes tucked into the space between cushion and arm. "If I ignore her, she gets worse. If I engage her, she gets worse. There's only one thing to do."

He took a sip from a mug close to hand, then made a face at the taste. He rarely cleared the used mugs from his desk, so the age of the beverage he'd just sampled was anyone's guess. "Talk to her like a reasonable adult and colleague?"

How could one be so powerful and all-knowing, yet so remarkably naive? Harrow snorted again, hard enough this time to bring up a little phlegm. "Kill her."

"Ninth," the Emperor said wearily as he leaned back in his chair and swung slowly back and forth. "You know that's against the rules."

There were, in her opinion, entirely too many rules for lyctorhood. It was ironic, or would have been if she'd had a sense of humor and appreciation for such twists. You did horrible things, committed unforgivable and terrible acts, all in order to achieve a semblance of total knowledge and immortality, yet _now_ there were rules? One might have been forgiven for assuming that, having eaten a soul, one could do whatever the hell one wanted. This was far from the case. There were always more rules, for etiquette and treatment of fellow adepts (no killing was only #4) as well as necromantic procedure, for research protocol (the tome-borrowing rules alone were as labyrinthine as any catacomb in the Ninth), than any ordinary sadsack mortal commoner could ever dream of. 

"Perhaps," his immortal omnipotence, the prince of perseverance and preservation, resurrector resplendent, suggested the next time Harrow visited, "you're not seeking a solution from me? Perhaps you just need a, a..." When he stammered, his gaze flicked down. She realized with a sinking feeling that he was consulting note cards cupped in his palm. "A sounding board, a sympathetic ear through which you will be able to come to your own resolution of the trouble?"

He sounded so hopeful that she was tempted to lie to him. "Not hardly," she said instead. "I keep hoping you'll get as sick of her horseshit as I am and, I don't know, exile her to the Burning Pits or the Depths of the Choking Tides."

"Oh." He scratched the crepey skin at his jawline, rasping the faint stubble there. "I'm probably not going to do that."

"You underestimate my determination."

"Impossible," he replied, smiling. "It is, I suspect, something well beyond 'depthless'."

Well. At least he had an accurate measure of her.

*

"Poor little nun," Ianthe crooned as she tightened her grasp on Harrow's neck. "Reads so much, plays with so many bones, and still doesn't understand jack-fucking-shit."

Harrow's toes scraped the floor. She'd been minding her own business — she was _always_ minding her own business! Mostly, anyway. Usually — consulting pre-Resurrection video records in the archive. _Video_ was still enough of a novelty to her that she was embarrassed by how thrilling it was to see the legends of the field moving and smiling, scowling and gesturing. Perhaps that was why Ianthe managed to catch her off-guard.

Perhaps Ianthe was just a sneaky little bitch. She'd been experimenting more with short-distance teleportation recently. Why, Harrow neither knew nor cared. A lyctor did not need to sneak up on anyone or catch them off-guard. The mere fact of _being_ a lyctor was more than enough. A lyctor descended in glory and fearful awe, or so she was assured.

"Explain it, then," Harrow managed to get out, more as distraction from the fact that she was working loose a bone chip from her wrist cuff than from any genuine desire to hear Ianthe's lunatic insults. 

"Barely a lyctor, hardly even a necro." Ianthe caught Harrow's wrist and twisted it up against her back. So much for that chip of bone. "You were hot shit in your hole, but you know what they say about sewage."

Harrow didn't bother to ask; Ianthe would supply the answer. So far as she had been able to conclude, Ianthe wanted to beat her, sure, but more than that, she wanted an audience for her abuse. Without her sister and cav, the Third was desperate for something to kick.

Harrow concentrated on twisting her hand to breaking to reach another bone chip in the setting of her ring. The ring was a heavy, ornate one, inestimably old (though still well post-Resurrection). Her mother had given it to her on her sixth birthday. Its black jewel was cloudy with age, cracked along two facets (convenient for chip storage), and bigger than Harrow's thumb knuckles.

Ianthe clucked her tongue reprovingly and wrenched Harrow widdershins before tossing her away. One-armed, yet she was stronger than anyone here besides the emperor. _Definitely_ crueler than all of them put together.

"Nice try, missy," Ianthe said, foot on Harrow's neck to pin her still as she showed her the ring. "Got your arsenal."

Rage flared, blue and hot, through Harrow. "Give it back!"

And just like that, she was a child again, spitting and clawing, furious at someone bigger and stronger. She tasted salt and blood spill down the back of her throat and fought to see through stinging eyes. These were the times when she could have easily killed. She'd wanted to, so badly, so very deeply. She would not be controlled, could not be bossed, would never submit. While she'd spent hours at night planning traps and accidents, anything that could hasten Gideon's demise, her true genius had come in these skirmishes. She'd fought like a wild thing, a sack of rabid weasels. She'd come close several times, and only Crux or Aiglamene's intervention stopped the fight. 

Now, she got her hands on Ianthe's neck and squeezed, willing a skeletal shield out of a single chip, shoving Ianthe up and back, tossing her aside.

"Give me my ring."

"Whatever," Ianthe said from behind her own blood-speckled flesh pavise. "It's fugly anyway."

The ring whizzed past Harrow's ear and fell to the floor. Harrow retrieved it and replaced it on her aching finger before wiping the blood from her nose and eyes. The tiny snarl of red hair was still tucked under the stone and woven around three of the prongs.

Harrow had won. Ianthe was not Gideon, however. Ianthe was _nothing_ like Gideon, and the fact that she could have conflated the two made Harrow all the more furious.

*

It was possible, she admitted only to herself, that there was, if not grief (which, again, she should not have been subject to), a host of unresolved feelings. Specifically, about Gideon Nav. Despite everything they had said at the very end, somehow Harrow remained affected by Gideon's loss.

She needed to make contact. She would never go so far as to say she needed to make _amends_ , as Gideon's sacrifice was her own decision. But, perhaps, somehow, Harrow could have done _more_ for Gideon.

She couldn't find any trace of Gideon within her own soul. That might have spoken of a complete, perfect lyctoral integration, but Harrow (again, privately) doubted that. Everything about Gideon's sacrifice and their union had been harried and ad-hoc and _desperate_. That it had worked at all was the miracle.

To summon Gideon, however, proved to be a challenge.

*

She tossed together a skeleton torso that looked like Gideon: taller than Harrow, broad shoulders, insouciant posture. A pair of dark smoked-glass spectacles completed the look. She set out a gorgeous claymore alongside a nudie magazine and the latest issue of **Lunar Justice Team**.

"You really thought this looked good?" Having double-checked the locks and variety of wards on her door, she sat opposite the torso and folded her legs under her. "You look ridiculous."

She kept a corner of her bunk wreathed in tapestries from home and constantly under barrage from the air-cooling apparatus. It wasn't the Ninth, but it was closer than anything else. The drapery smelled like rot, carcasses of carpet beetles and incipient new forms of lichen. She tugged a length of it around her shoulders before saying to the Gideon-skull, "Well? No strained attempt at witty reply from the dankest depths of memetic stupidity?"

The jaw clattered and clicked. "Bite me, Nonagesimus."

The voice was a wheeze from the other side, a long and guttural exhale across the turgid waters of the river.

"You're not my type," she replied.

"Tell that to Tomb Girl," the skull said. It could not make expressions, obviously, but when its mandible gaped open, it gave an overwhelming impression of... _leering_. "She said to say 'hey', by the way."

Harrow pressed her fingertips against her closed lids. "Nav."

"My ever-burning witch, my shriek of sizzling-cold thanergy, what can I do you for?"

"Nav..." She couldn't say anything else. This was a waste of time. Parlor game shams. "I miss you."

"How can you miss —" The torso leaned forward, but misjudged the distance and snapped off a lower rib. "— that which you have always had?"

"This isn't you." Harrow was just a child playing with rattling dolls. That was all she'd ever been, and, soon enough, everyone from the emperor on down would figure it out. "Forget it."

"This is so me," the skull insisted. "This is, like, me over nine thousand."

Harrow waved her left hand, and the construct collapsed with a snicker and a cackle. Of course this didn't work.

*

She could hardly consult the current Fifth Lyctor. He was a shambles of a man, first of all, but more importantly, of course, no one could know what she was looking for. She'd come this far without much suspicion beyond Ianthe's rambling insults and accusations, and she preferred to keep it like this. 

That left, then, finding a necro from the Fifth who was both powerful and discreet. This was a task far more easily described than accomplished. If she were from any other house, she would know, at least, where to start looking. But she hailed from a hole in a rock in the ass-end of occupied space. It was a hole that she loved with everything she was, but one that had never allowed for very much social interaction with others at all.

She was deep in Trentham's Old Quarter, ensconced in a lyctoral suite, reviewing refugee files, when the solution presented itself.

Quite literally, the nearly-bald, stocky woman knocked casually on the doorframe and did not pause as she let herself into Harrow's office.

"Excuse me?" Harrow quelled the instinct to toss a spiny skeleton up between her desk and the intruder. Such things were not done outside of home or Canaan House: More rules. She fingered her wrist cuff anyway. If the woman had made it this far through the layers and labyrinths of security, she was either a cunning insurgent or welcome here.

"You're Nonagesimus," the woman announced and dropped in the single chair opposite the desk. There had been files piled there, but they were now floating into her lap. "I've heard about you."

"Hardly the deference I might expect," Harrow replied. "And am due."

"Ugh," the woman says. "Let's not stand on ceremony, 'kay?"

For a moment, Harrow suspected Ianthe of yet more harassment. This woman could be Gideon's sister, or cousin, what with her muscular sprawl and the weary ironic fillip to her voice. That would be giving Ianthe quite a bit of credit, to be sure. She preferred outright attack and violence to clever schemes and designated agents. Harrow would have been surprised had Ianthe managed to observe enough about her to choose such a perfect agent.

"Who are you?" Harrow asked.

"Damn it, Jem, get it tofuckgether," she muttered. She leaned across the desk, hand out. "Jemima Pesë, at your service."

"I have no need of service," Harrow said. She could hear all too well the awkwardness stiffening her tone. One thing about leaving the Ninth and being subject to others' reactions and judgments was this self-consciousness. Even as a Lyctor, she could not escape such feelings. She cleared her throat. "Thank you, but there must be some mistake."

"No mistake," Pesë said. She scrubbed her hand through her short dark hair, making it spring out in wiry curlicues.

"Pesë," Harrow spoke as deliberately as possible, "I had a cav. I no longer need a cav. Your interruption is forgiven, but I must..."

"Holy shitballs!" Pesë erupted in braying laughter. Wincing, Harrow gestured at her to quiet. "Sorry, sorry. Never been mistaken for a cav before, that's so fucking cool."

"You're not a cav."

"Nah, but — how hot would that be? So hot. Wicked rad, really." She licked the corner of her lips and, despite herself, Harrow was briefly fascinated.

Harrow massaged her temples. "Please get to the point. When I get headachey, I grow even more irritable than usual."

"I can talk to your dead," Pesë replied promptly, sobering up immediately. "Heard you needed some, you know." She cocked her left eyebrow and continued, huskily, "Fifth-brand _oomph_. That's me." She thumped her fist against her (ample) chest for emphasis. Unnecessary, but, Harrow had to admit, appreciated.

"I don't know where you got that idea..."

"Look, I studied with the house's most ancient maestros and mediums. I'm not primary, but I'm damn good. Real talk? I'm better at this than she was."

"Pence."

"Yeah. She had the analytical smarts, no question. Research and synthesis of disparate texts? She was your girl. My disciplinary focus is narrower, but, lucky for you, I'm also exactly what you need."

"I have no idea," Harrow said carefully, "what you could possibly mean."

Pesë grinned again. Her front teeth had a small gap between them. The interior of her lips was very red. "You sure about that, Your Dread Grace?"

*

The Emperor kept his word to renew the Ninth. When Harrow returned home, she brought with her six-times-sixty refugees and orphans, all under eighteen, as well as a small battery of civil servants to oversee their administration and integration. 

She killed off her parents for good, then used their funeral rites to introduce the Ninth to the impending changes.

Crux was horrified as well as quite obviously terrified. "My lady, this is not a boon! This is, is, a... _curse_ , the worst thing to happen to this august house since the arrival of that foul ginger orphan!"

"Gideon Nav died with honor," Harrow scolded him and, beside Crux, Aiglamene managed to swallow her snort of surprise. "She was the best of this house, and these new souls..." She smiled, so widely that both Crux and Aiglamene leaned back as if to avoid a _sotto voce_ curse. "They will carry on her legacy."

No one else questioned her. They never had, of course, but their obedience was different now. Earlier, they had complied out of fear and desperation; she was the only one of the decrepit house doing anything. Now, however, the Ninth was fuller than it had been since her grandfather's grandfather's time. It could have become a cacophony of conflicting goals and contradictory voices, but it did not. She remained the sole voice and only guiding light. She was _respected_ , held in awe, even, and if the obedience was still tinged with fear, it was fear of her, not of anything else.

She was a Lyctor. She commanded awe.

Her blind aunts ran the bones and wrapped their eyes three times with black netting. When she passed them in the echoing corridors of Drearburh, they went still as the marble figures that outnumbered both mortals and skeletons. She worried, faintly, that one day the sisters would forget to draw breath again once Harrow was out of range.

She had never been so alone.

She used to think that she was alone. The desperate hopes and impossible future of the all-but-dead house weighed down her skinny shoulders and choked her. The responsibility was a millstone and it sharpened her already suspicious and antisocial nature into something nearly malevolent and, certainly, poisonous.

Despite what she'd believed, all through her adolescence, she had never been alone. Her memories, now that she was here again, were full of people. There were Crux and Aiglamene, even Ortus and her blind aunts, and, always, Gideon. Harrow had made sure that Gideon was bound to her. Harrow _clung_ to the idea and fact of Gideon so tenaciously, with bleeding nails and dislocated jaw, that she could not, until the very end, perceive Gideon as anything else but _hers_. Her burden, her heart, her tumor, and her beloved.

And now she really was alone. She was august. She was blessing her beloved house with renewed hope and vigor, while her own soul was wandering the wastes, dwindling away fast. 

She had never been more powerful; _this_ was everything her family had worked to make happen. This exceeded their dearest hopes.

The Ninth was saved, but it was no longer home, not for her.

*

"Can't find her," Pesë said again. "You're giving me a serious crisis of confidence here, you know that?"

"Try harder."

"Don't order me around."

Harrow drew herself as tall as possible and narrowed her eyes. Snickering, Pesë tugged on the sleeve of Harrow's robe, then slid her hand inside, around the cold skin on Harrow's waist.

"Someone has to," Harrow whispered as she knelt astride one of Pesë's thighs. "Order you around. Make you do things. Tell you — ah!"

Pesë buried her face in the sharp curve of Harrow's neck. "You're terrible."

"I prefer 'awful'."

She'd left the Ninth on a private shuttle and returned to the Emperor's capital ship. There, her cabin had already been taken over by Pesë and her bright clothes and jangly jewelery and various ridiculous séance supplies.

Pesë had tried, and failed, to reach Gideon thirteen times since Trentham.

"I don't think," Pesë said when they'd both come and dozed and eaten, "she _can_ be summoned."

"Nonsense. Anyone can be summoned. Just make the command stronger."

"No," Pesë said, and her refusal was not, for once, flirtatious. It wasn't an invitation to probe and provoke. "Can't. Won't."

Harrow's skin tightened and she imagined sixty skeletons flaying Pesë until she complied. She closed her eyes and willed away the temptation to cruelty. Forcing her will wasn't half so attractive, not any longer.

"What do you suggest, then?"

"She can't be summoned," Pesë said slowly, "but maybe you can go to her."

*

The river between here and there is a foul and depthless stream, choked with sorrows and swirling with riptides and regrets. The fare to cross was inestimably high, even for someone of Harrowhark's stature. Even if she could negotiate a crossing, there was absolutely no guarantee that she'd survive the voyage.

"And should ye survive and wish to return, well, then..." The ferrymaster was a ridiculous old man draped in tatters, his face sticky with makeup. He clearly relished his role. Give him shrouds and a scythe, he'd be chewing them up in no time.

"Yeah, yeah," she replied. "I'm thinking about it."

"Don't think too hard, missy," he wheezed. He shuffled over to loom over her in what she was sure was meant to be a creepy manner. It was more exasperating than anything else. "Ye know what they say..."

While he trailed off into a cackle that itself died in phlegm-rattling cough, she merely watched him. He gradually composed himself, straightening his back and wiping an old handkerchief across his mouth. 

"Whatever," he muttered. He added something about upstart young people and their presumptions. Knowitall adepts and stupid cultists.

She thought, happily, of how she could evert him with a flick of the wrist, yank his skin to the inside and display his ligaments and bones like clacking jewelery.

(The flick of the wrist would be superfluous to accomplishing the magic itself, but dramatic, and, therefore, not at all superfluous.)

Slowly, she paced the strand. The pavement was irregular, concrete slapped over ancient stone, then cracked by frost and hastily, poorly repaired. A few sorry souls ducked the toll booth and set out alone across the churning waters. They stumbled and fell soon enough, shrieking as the rapids battered them against unseen dangers. The more sensible shades queued at the ferrymaster's hut or held hands as they trudged along the razor-thin bridge that swayed over the river.

She wondered where her parents were. They must have observed tradition, or they would not be themselves, yet it was incredibly difficult to imagine them dutifully joining the line and sharing a ferry over with some collection of shady randos.

Honestly, Harrow had rarely wasted much thought on the river, or what happened on its far bank. Her power had always been such that she hadn't _needed_ to think about this place, the journey here and the existence over there.

Damn Gideon, always pushing her into unfamiliar and stupid predicaments.

"Well?" The ferrymaster, changed out of his edgelord cryptkeeper costume into drab (and far less ragged) mufti, reappeared, zipping up his canvas jacket. "I'm off now, if'n you want a lift back." He jerked his thumb in the direction she came.

"What about the queue? What are they supposed to do?" she asked, surprising herself. Since when did she give a petrified shit about other people?

He tugged a dark cap, chalky at the crease, over his brow. "Second shift's due any minute." He grinned and continued, adopting his wheezy, theatrically-spooky voice, "Or century, ahahahaha."

"Droll." She stepped around him and knelt on the bank, trailing her fingertips through the roiling waters.

"Fucking crazy witches," he grumbled. 

She continued to ignore his entirely unwelcome and opinion.

Soon enough, she was alone again. The river rushed past her, scrolled with foam that took the shape of runes and prayers, only to unfurl and disappear. A child's shade wept as the ferry creaked at the pier.

"Yo, scrawnbutt!"

Harrow's head jerked up so fast her teeth clacked together. A little way downstream, long vertical shadows parted and reassembled, revealing a large, gallumphing form topped with coppery-red hair.

"Gideon?"

"For fuck's sake, Nonagesimus, what're you doing here? Come to join the fun and waste my whole entire heroic journey and accomplishment?" Gideon stood on the far bank, fists planted on her hips as she shouted. "That'd be just like you, you slithery little _shit_!"

"Gideon!" She started to tip forward, into the loose stones dividing strand from water.

"Stay there, nerd!"

Gideon tramped across the river with as little hesitation as she'd show crossing a shallow puddle. In three, four, strides, she had arrived. Her smart, hobnailed boots were barely wet. With one hand, she hauled Harrow to her feet, then a little higher. Gideon let her dangle there, toes scraping the asphalt, while she looked Harrow over.

"Lyctorhood suits you, weenie."

Harrow found her footing and dusted off her skirts. "You think?"

Gideon nodded. "You're looking, um. Like...."

Harrow squared her shoulders. Ianthe had gained at least half a foot in height, and Harrow's own robes were a little short in the arms these days. "Bigger?"

"Nope, still shrimpy as hell." Gideon narrowed her empty eyes — the dead see all, with nothing — and tapped her chin. "Hmm."

"Better," Harrow supplied. She was so much stronger these days. "I look better."

Gideon's laughter barked across the river and bounced back. "No, not as such."

"What, then?" Harrow demanded. Only Gideon could manage to get under her skin so quickly, so _decisively_. "Spit it out."

"Dunno," Gideon said, taking a step back and surveying Harrow up and down and then back up. "Mightier, I guess. For an evil little insect? So, relative."

"Well," Harrow said and sniffed. "I suppose that will have to do."

Gideon punched Harrow's shoulder. "Seriously, Miz Lyctor High and Mighty, what brings you down? We've got a keg just tapped, you want to do some stands?"

"Do I...?" Harrow squinted to peer over Gideon's shoulder. The far bank was lush and verdant, filled with shield-maidens and extremely butch beauties, all arm-wrestling and sharing steins of ale. "Did you join a frat, Nav?"

"Better, man!" She leaned over and said conspiratorially, "Called Sessrúmnir or some shit. It's _all_ babes."

"Ah," Harrow replied. She felt the cold of the river creeping up through the soles of her boots. The mist settled around her head and down her back, embracing her front and back. She needed to blow her nose and clear her throat. "That's wonderful."

"It's fucking _great_ , is what it is," Gideon said, as if they were arguing. 

They weren't.

"I miss you," Harrow said. Those were the only words in her mind, the only sounds her thick tongue could possibly have formed. "Gideon —"

"But I'm right here," Gideon said, as obstinate and thick-headed as she had ever been in life. She took a lateral step, brushing their hands together, then kept moving, shifting into the space that Harrow herself occupied.

One moment she had been alone. Now she was doubled, blurred at the edges and stretched taller, seeing all and feeling even more.

"Hey, Harrowhark," Gideon whispered, right against Harrow's brainstem.

She shivered but fought to remain relatively still. "Yes?" 

"I—" Gideon took a breath and Harrow's ribs inflated. "— Am —" She lifted their arms and opened their palms to the shades above. "— In —" She twirled them, stumbling and laughing, around and around. " _You_."

"Oh, god," Harrow said, gasping, as they crumpled down to sit on the bank. "You are, aren't you?"

"Yeah," Gideon said, humming something. "Right where I'm supposed to be. Not my fault you doubted your own spoopy powers."

"I just assumed..." Harrow exhaled gustily. "I don't know what I assumed."

"I saw what you did with that Fiver medium. _Disgusting_."

Harrow wanted to cover her face. What the hell good would that have done?

"...I've never been so proud," Gideon concluded. Something shifted, warm and rustling, around all of Harrow's nerves. "You dirty freak. Go, girl."

Harrow wrapped her arms around herself and leaned against a piling. "Going," she replied. "Soon."


End file.
